Headlines from Thursday, Sept. 7, 1939 in the North Battleford News. (Supplied/Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan)

By Martin Martinson

Turning Back the Clock

Provincial Archives offers glimpse into past with digitalization of historic newspapers online

Aug 26, 2019 | 5:00 PM

This September will mark the 80^th anniversary since the outbreak of the Second World War.

To commemorate the occasion, the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan are releasing digitized copies of community newspapers from around the province from 1939 to 1945.

The venture is part of a larger project in which the Provincial Archives have partnered with the University of Saskatchewan to transfer local newspapers from throughout Saskatchewan into digital copies that will be available on the Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers online website.

The archives collection features roughly 10 million pages of news print from as early as 1885 dating up to the present day.

Due to such a vast number of articles needing to be processed, the task as a whole is split up into smaller thematic projects. So far the earliest archives have already been digitized, extending from the Riel Resistance, through to the First World War.

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The years covering the Second World War is the latest of the thematic projects in the series.

Headlines from Thursday, Sept. 7, 1939 in the North Battleford News.

Manager of the records processing unit and preservation services, Curt Campbell said because the original paper-copy of the newspapers were microfilmed years ago, the process of digitizing the microfilm is actually quite quick using efficient, modern equipment.

A machine is used to run through the reels of microfilm, digitizing them and then parsing them into their component pages. Campbell said the more time-consuming part comes once the articles are uploaded in their digital form.

“The real work comes in when you have to provide all the descriptive information around each one of those issues,” he said. “[Organizing] each one of those pages, the volumes of material, [and setting it up] for people so when they are navigating through it on the web, they can actually find what they are want to look at.”

Campbell said the archives are important to offer because it provides insight on what regular people in a given community were dealing with in their everyday lives, providing added context to the time period.

“These are community newspapers so you are going to get everything from the big headlines to, on the side bar, the price of wheat, who’s getting married and every day minutia,” he said. “It all works together with these larger events that are happening to give a bit more intimate look into what is going on in Saskatchewan.”

Headlines from Sept. 21, 1939 in the Battleford Press. (supplied/Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan)

To browse the Battleford article collection, click here.

To browse the North Battleford article collection, click here.

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Martin.Martinson@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @MartyMartyPxP1